The Infinite Machine

As with large corporations, to him, governments become “inefficient once they cross a certain size threshold.”

Developers learned the world can’t be crammed into smart contracts, and that smart contracts will only be as smart as the people who wrote them—and those who tried to break them for nefarious or hubristic reasons.

Ethereans learned that they can program computers, but they can’t program humans, whose greed, ambition, and ingenuity can be strong enough to find their way around those programs.

Vitalik’s vision was much too big to be constrained by another chain. He was thinking about creating a base layer for everything. A computer that could simultaneously live in all the nodes of an enormous global network, which would be able to process anything you threw at it, without downtime or interference, so developers could build whatever they

Another issue to address in peer-to-peer, pseudonymous systems was Sybil attacks. Just as coins can be replicated in a digital world, so can identities. This is a problem in a network of equal peers because an attacker could create a large number of pseudonymous identities to gain a disproportionately large influence.

Peer-to-peer networks interconnect equally privileged nodes with each other, allowing users to share and transfer data without the need of a centralized administrative entity. Systems using this architecture are resilient against censorship, attacks, and manipulation. Just like the mythological Hydra, there’s no one head that you can cut off to kil

“government is bad because it’s a monopoly more than for any other reason. You can think of the world as a free market anarchy where all the land is legitimately owned by 193 landowners that allow you to live on the land under certain conditions.”

And blockchains didn’t fix everything. They made everything slower, and harder. It made sense to use them only in very specific situations. Smart contracts didn’t make invincible applications. They’re difficult to code, and the use cases weren’t so obvious anymore. Suddenly, after the reality check of the hard fork, Ethereum didn’t feel like a magi

When a transaction is executed, it is broadcast to all the computers in the network for them to update their ledgers. Transactions are bunched together to form a block of data, and once that block runs out of space (1 megabyte right now), computers race to solve a complex mathematical puzzle to verify the transactions, seal the block, and record it